Why is my local bakery's good so much better than the supermarket?
October 19, 2019 10:26 AM Subscribe
I just bought a sticky bun from my local bakery. To put it mildly it is effing delicious - light, moist and sweet but not too sweet. It made me wonder: What is the main reason why the packaged baked goods at the supermarket are so yucky? Of course they aren't as fresh, but is there also a question of ingredients? I couldn't think of anything that a bakery does that couldn't be automated on some factory line. But clearly there's a missing element! What is it?
lots of things, all related to efficiency and cost. Baked goods with butter are better, but more expensive; butter also has to be refrigerated, so the storage cost in the kitchen is higher (than using oil or shortening.) Real vanilla is different and costs many times more than imitation vanilla. Yeast doughs need time to develop flavor before they're baked; that time cuts deeply into profit opportunity. Chocolate quality varies hugely. You don't like things super sweet, but sugar is a humectant and preservative, so it reduces waste to add a bunch of it (because it renders things sellable longer.) A bakery will probably employ someone who has specific pastry experience; I'm not sure how staffing a supermarket works, but I doubt it's the same. Those are just examples.
posted by fingersandtoes at 10:31 AM on October 19, 2019 [45 favorites]
posted by fingersandtoes at 10:31 AM on October 19, 2019 [45 favorites]
Lots of supermarket bakeries purchase their base doughs through large supply chains that are mechanized and just generally low quality for labor and speed reasons. Cisco provides most of the base doughs around my region.
FWIW, Adding preservatives and other “unpronounceable” ingredients on more shelf-stable has little impact on quality; you can purchase these ingredients readily and they have little impact on quality. Most artisan bakeries forego then for Cody reasons, not direct quality reasons.
posted by furnace.heart at 10:49 AM on October 19, 2019 [5 favorites]
FWIW, Adding preservatives and other “unpronounceable” ingredients on more shelf-stable has little impact on quality; you can purchase these ingredients readily and they have little impact on quality. Most artisan bakeries forego then for Cody reasons, not direct quality reasons.
posted by furnace.heart at 10:49 AM on October 19, 2019 [5 favorites]
Some of this also has to do with shipping. Baked goods that are light and airy do not ship well, so we get packaged goods that are typically denser which takes away a lot of that flavor and mouth feel that baked goods that do not have to be shipped possess.
posted by dstopps at 10:52 AM on October 19, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by dstopps at 10:52 AM on October 19, 2019 [3 favorites]
I think both freshness and packaging. Many baked goods depend on a contrast in water content between different parts. A good example is bread, which should have a dry crust and moist crumb (yes, there are exceptions). As soon as you wrap it in plastic, moisture begins migrating from the moist to the dry, and it reaches "mediocre" pretty fast, in my experience. This is a huge problem at small coffeeshops, which seem to be reluctant to spend dough and counter space on a case for pastries (which are usually from a good bakery and were good), offering plastic-wrapped mediocrity. Even the bakery will frequently try to put my bread in a plastic bag. WTF?
Also, notice the day-old shelf at the supermarket? No, because it would have to be a month-old shelf.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 10:57 AM on October 19, 2019 [10 favorites]
Also, notice the day-old shelf at the supermarket? No, because it would have to be a month-old shelf.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 10:57 AM on October 19, 2019 [10 favorites]
The fresh baguettes and loafs offered in paper at a chain grocery bakery aren't usually too bad. These are usually baked by humans not machines, and using highly processed white flour & commercial yeast that can make the process relatively rote so that most employees can learn it. Anything wrapped in plastic and designed to be shelf-stable for longer than 24 hours is going to be much lower quality in terms of taste.
It's hard to know without knowing about what specific pastry you are thinking of, but here are some things that small bakeries can do that automated mass production cannot:
- serve you things that were baked in the last 12 hours ("yesterday" baked goods are usually at a DEEP discount at small bakeries)
- serve you things with no preservatives that have never been wrapped in plastic (ruins crust)
- use wild yeast starter as a leaven instead of commercial yeast
- use high hydration dough that is too difficult for a mechanical mixer to handle (requires dexterity of human hands)
- make subjective expert human decisions during baking based on ambient temperature, yesterday's bake and what you know about these particular batches of grain/flour, performance of the starter in the last few days, appearance of the levain and the dough throughout the process (i.e. add more water or less, let autolyze/rest/bulk for less/more time, etc.)
posted by amaire at 11:32 AM on October 19, 2019 [10 favorites]
It's hard to know without knowing about what specific pastry you are thinking of, but here are some things that small bakeries can do that automated mass production cannot:
- serve you things that were baked in the last 12 hours ("yesterday" baked goods are usually at a DEEP discount at small bakeries)
- serve you things with no preservatives that have never been wrapped in plastic (ruins crust)
- use wild yeast starter as a leaven instead of commercial yeast
- use high hydration dough that is too difficult for a mechanical mixer to handle (requires dexterity of human hands)
- make subjective expert human decisions during baking based on ambient temperature, yesterday's bake and what you know about these particular batches of grain/flour, performance of the starter in the last few days, appearance of the levain and the dough throughout the process (i.e. add more water or less, let autolyze/rest/bulk for less/more time, etc.)
posted by amaire at 11:32 AM on October 19, 2019 [10 favorites]
At the supermarket I worked at, a lot of bakery products came in frozen and were then re-heated, which just doesn't result in as good a pastry.
posted by stillnocturnal at 11:35 AM on October 19, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by stillnocturnal at 11:35 AM on October 19, 2019 [4 favorites]
The ingredient list for a croissant from my local bakery:
Wheat flour (which I happen to know is a special kind designed for flaky pastries), water, milk, butter, egg, yeast, sugar, salt.
The ingredient list for an "all-butter" croissant from my local supermarket chain:
Enriched wheat flour, water, butter, yeast, sugar, salt, diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono and diglycerides, calcium carbonate, canola and/or soya oil, ascorbic acid, alpha amylase, egg powder, soy flour, milk powder.
The ones from the bakery taste amazing, but they're only really good for a day before they get stale. The bakery pre-preps a few of their hardier doughs, but for the most part mixes and bakes everything the night before it's sold. Anything that's left over at the end of the day is donated to a network of local homeless shelters who use it for the next day's breakfasts.
The supermarket, meanwhile, trades the superior short-lived taste and texture of those whole ingredients for something that isn't quite as tasty or texturally pleasurable but will last from the time the dough is transported from the factory where it's prepared, through the on-site baking/heating and packaging/shelving process, and to some time after the customer brings it home, since the expectation with a supermarket is that people do larger shopping trips periodically instead of buying fresh things every day. These croissants are usually labelled as having been packaged a day or two before I buy them, likely come from dough prepared a while before that and refrigerated/frozen in between, and still last for three or four days after I bring them home.
Could everything the bakery does with these croissants be done on a factory line, either automated or by assembly line for the processes that require gentler handling and more human judgement than a machine can provide? Absolutely. But without those preservatives and emulsifiers and shelf-friendly substitutes, the factory would need to be close enough to all the supermarkets it serves to get freshly baked pastries to all its shops the morning they're going to be sold, every day. That defeats the profitability purpose of using a centralized factory. The bakery, working on a smaller scale and doing things in-house, not only has the advantage of being kind and timely with their dough in a way that maximizes taste and texture, but also has a lot more flexibility to tweak their recipes, stock, and prices based on local demand and customer feedback.
posted by northernish at 12:17 PM on October 19, 2019 [6 favorites]
Wheat flour (which I happen to know is a special kind designed for flaky pastries), water, milk, butter, egg, yeast, sugar, salt.
The ingredient list for an "all-butter" croissant from my local supermarket chain:
Enriched wheat flour, water, butter, yeast, sugar, salt, diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono and diglycerides, calcium carbonate, canola and/or soya oil, ascorbic acid, alpha amylase, egg powder, soy flour, milk powder.
The ones from the bakery taste amazing, but they're only really good for a day before they get stale. The bakery pre-preps a few of their hardier doughs, but for the most part mixes and bakes everything the night before it's sold. Anything that's left over at the end of the day is donated to a network of local homeless shelters who use it for the next day's breakfasts.
The supermarket, meanwhile, trades the superior short-lived taste and texture of those whole ingredients for something that isn't quite as tasty or texturally pleasurable but will last from the time the dough is transported from the factory where it's prepared, through the on-site baking/heating and packaging/shelving process, and to some time after the customer brings it home, since the expectation with a supermarket is that people do larger shopping trips periodically instead of buying fresh things every day. These croissants are usually labelled as having been packaged a day or two before I buy them, likely come from dough prepared a while before that and refrigerated/frozen in between, and still last for three or four days after I bring them home.
Could everything the bakery does with these croissants be done on a factory line, either automated or by assembly line for the processes that require gentler handling and more human judgement than a machine can provide? Absolutely. But without those preservatives and emulsifiers and shelf-friendly substitutes, the factory would need to be close enough to all the supermarkets it serves to get freshly baked pastries to all its shops the morning they're going to be sold, every day. That defeats the profitability purpose of using a centralized factory. The bakery, working on a smaller scale and doing things in-house, not only has the advantage of being kind and timely with their dough in a way that maximizes taste and texture, but also has a lot more flexibility to tweak their recipes, stock, and prices based on local demand and customer feedback.
posted by northernish at 12:17 PM on October 19, 2019 [6 favorites]
I just wanna put in a counter-argument to the "it's superior ingredients" one and another vote for freshness. Our cheap supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl) offer "freshly baked" (i.e. delivered frozen and baked in store) pastries. These are vastly superior to any of the overpriced (but baked very early that day, or perhaps the day before) pastries our high end bakeries with decades and sometimes centuries of tradition are flogging. No matter how good the ingredients are, they cannot compete with something that was baked, at most, 2 hours before.
posted by ClarissaWAM at 12:48 PM on October 19, 2019 [12 favorites]
posted by ClarissaWAM at 12:48 PM on October 19, 2019 [12 favorites]
In addition to all of the above, consider that you might have tasted an exceptional offering from a particularly good local bakery. I’ve eaten plenty of things from local bakeries that were underwhelming, or fine but not remarkable. On the whole, bakeries’ baked goods are better than stuff from supermarkets, but the difference isn’t always so drastic, and there’s some overlap between supermarkets’ best and bakeries’ worst.
posted by Metroid Baby at 1:21 PM on October 19, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by Metroid Baby at 1:21 PM on October 19, 2019 [6 favorites]
If you’re comparing apples to apples (local shop and grocery chain are both aiming for equally high quality and freshness), the difference is probably due to the chain reducing variability in the final product. A small bakery or single baker has more individual control over the final output so can include reliance on individual skill and taste as part of the process, and knows they’ll throw out anything substandard. The chain is too big to do that so they have to prevent their baking process from relying too much on the skill and taste of the employee, which means a superlative result is impossible.
posted by michaelh at 1:39 PM on October 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by michaelh at 1:39 PM on October 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
I can't really tell if you mean supermarket bakery vs mass produced shelf products vs lower volume local bakery.
I worked in a small scale industrial bagel bakery for a while. Big enough to have their own shops around a few towns, and to provide product to some supermarkets (in the bin of bagels way). Both frozen uncooked to some places and freshly make to others.
I was the mixmaster, in a 3 am with the boss and starting up the early production before the rest of the staff would come in a few hours later.
It's a mixture of all of the things... The weirdest ingredient we'd use would be the blueberry flavoring syrup. The rest was just flour, salt, yeast, sugar, dried or frozen fruit, nothing weird at all.
Some were baked immediately and sent out to stores, some were just frozen and sent to outlets that had the proofing/baking/toppings and could do that part themselves.
Those fist few batches were dialing in the right amount of water and mixing time, and sometimes using ice to keep the dough cool during the day all depending on the weather at the time.
So, yeah... ingredients and freshness and little tweaks depending on the weather, maybe just skill and experience.
oof, I went home every day with a big bag of bagels too feed my roommates. And the best were the green chili.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:57 PM on October 19, 2019 [4 favorites]
I worked in a small scale industrial bagel bakery for a while. Big enough to have their own shops around a few towns, and to provide product to some supermarkets (in the bin of bagels way). Both frozen uncooked to some places and freshly make to others.
I was the mixmaster, in a 3 am with the boss and starting up the early production before the rest of the staff would come in a few hours later.
It's a mixture of all of the things... The weirdest ingredient we'd use would be the blueberry flavoring syrup. The rest was just flour, salt, yeast, sugar, dried or frozen fruit, nothing weird at all.
Some were baked immediately and sent out to stores, some were just frozen and sent to outlets that had the proofing/baking/toppings and could do that part themselves.
Those fist few batches were dialing in the right amount of water and mixing time, and sometimes using ice to keep the dough cool during the day all depending on the weather at the time.
So, yeah... ingredients and freshness and little tweaks depending on the weather, maybe just skill and experience.
oof, I went home every day with a big bag of bagels too feed my roommates. And the best were the green chili.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:57 PM on October 19, 2019 [4 favorites]
It's my impression that many factory-made confections are made with a generic dough rather than a specific dough for the particular bun.
posted by SemiSalt at 1:59 PM on October 19, 2019
posted by SemiSalt at 1:59 PM on October 19, 2019
The most common preservatives used in food are simple: sugar and salt.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:03 PM on October 19, 2019
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:03 PM on October 19, 2019
A guy I once dated who grew up in Paris claimed that bakeries there made fresh bread/pastries/etc very, very often (every couple of hours or something, I don't remember). He was not happy with the quality of goods from American bakeries because he thought that nothing was fresh enough.
posted by pinochiette at 2:03 PM on October 19, 2019
posted by pinochiette at 2:03 PM on October 19, 2019
I think flabadabet pretty much has it, but to take the comparison further, let's look at birthday cakes. Do you wonder the same thing? Do you think a supermarket cake could ever compare to a homemade one, or one made at a bakery?
Here's the ingredient list for a supermarket carrot cake. Cheap ingredients designed to be "foolproof" to make and last for a long time.
posted by jeremias at 2:23 PM on October 19, 2019
Here's the ingredient list for a supermarket carrot cake. Cheap ingredients designed to be "foolproof" to make and last for a long time.
posted by jeremias at 2:23 PM on October 19, 2019
A friend of mine builds factories for a living. Factories for baking.
He told me one line he built makes 200 pies per minute. How good do you think a factory-made pastry is gonna be given that level of care?
(He also told me the pies meant for the US have twice the sugar meant for the Canadian market.)
posted by dobbs at 2:26 PM on October 19, 2019 [5 favorites]
He told me one line he built makes 200 pies per minute. How good do you think a factory-made pastry is gonna be given that level of care?
(He also told me the pies meant for the US have twice the sugar meant for the Canadian market.)
posted by dobbs at 2:26 PM on October 19, 2019 [5 favorites]
It's freshness, in my opinion. The supermarket stuff is designed to be months old.
posted by xammerboy at 5:22 PM on October 19, 2019
posted by xammerboy at 5:22 PM on October 19, 2019
Baked goods from the bakery are stale the next day, (packaged) baked goods from the supermarket are stale in two weeks. I think this is partially preservatives (maybe mostly), but also the actual recipes they use. The more shelf-stable the item is, the drier it'll be and probably have less eggs and other spoilage vectors. There'll also be recipe modifications to adapt to high-volume production methods. Other forms of fat instead of butter, etc.
posted by rhizome at 8:39 PM on October 19, 2019
posted by rhizome at 8:39 PM on October 19, 2019
I think the OP is asking for specific reasons the supermarket goods are usually not that good, ie what specifically prevents mass produced pastries from being awesome.
I live in Poland and buy my bread rolls from the convenience store around the corner. They are delivered frozen and baked on site and are delicious - I usually eat them while still hot. Some of the bakeries also get premade dough this way I'm told. There was even an article in Der Spiegel last year about how its getting harder to decide what should and shouldn't be called a bakery since so many establishments don't do any actual baking. Can't link to it on my phone now but it's worth a Google search.
So yeah, it seems to be the shelf stability thing and the packaging.
posted by M. at 9:49 PM on October 19, 2019
I live in Poland and buy my bread rolls from the convenience store around the corner. They are delivered frozen and baked on site and are delicious - I usually eat them while still hot. Some of the bakeries also get premade dough this way I'm told. There was even an article in Der Spiegel last year about how its getting harder to decide what should and shouldn't be called a bakery since so many establishments don't do any actual baking. Can't link to it on my phone now but it's worth a Google search.
So yeah, it seems to be the shelf stability thing and the packaging.
posted by M. at 9:49 PM on October 19, 2019
The oven. Years ago an expat french baker moved to Seattle -- brought his oven. Maybe there's more to it than that (expertise, quality ingredients, ya ya all that) but I have never had a baguette as good.
posted by sammyo at 10:48 PM on October 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by sammyo at 10:48 PM on October 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
Nobody's brought up that a significant part of perceived flavor enjoyment is the context - how is your food presented, what is the environment you're consuming it in. (ex. Zellner et al 2014). I've seen more research on this looking at plate color (Piqueras-Fiszman et al 2012) and music played (Fiegel et al 2014). It's a pretty broad area of research because people are interested in inexpensive ways to make their food taste/sell better. Your local bakery is going to have a lot more control over atmosphere than the bakery section of a supermarket.
There is also the fact that most people expect that pastry from a local bakery will be better than that from a supermarket - they're going in with a bias. This is not always true - I have had some atrocious pastries from local bakers.
posted by momus_window at 8:34 AM on October 20, 2019 [1 favorite]
There is also the fact that most people expect that pastry from a local bakery will be better than that from a supermarket - they're going in with a bias. This is not always true - I have had some atrocious pastries from local bakers.
posted by momus_window at 8:34 AM on October 20, 2019 [1 favorite]
The things that have bothered me about supermarket/mass produced pastries and made me go "oh, this is not very good, is it?" are definitely the taste of the fats, probably from not using butter, and the dense, non-flaky texture.
posted by Zalzidrax at 8:56 AM on October 20, 2019
posted by Zalzidrax at 8:56 AM on October 20, 2019
I think the OP is asking for specific reasons the supermarket goods are usually not that good, ie what specifically prevents mass produced pastries from being awesome.
I have some Donettes here, let's see how they compare to a traditional cake donut recipe (flour, sugar, eggs, milk, baking powder, butter, etc.).
tl;dr: It's practically a different recipe, or at least the difference between a station wagon and a 4WD truck.
==
I'm not a food scientist, but this is my interpretation of the purpose of some of the "technical" ingredients in factory-made store-bought donuts, based on some cursory research. Take with a 0.1g Potassium Chloride. Actual bakers may know more.
All of this engineering results in a recognizable donut with some special properties: they'll resist the effects of moisture/humidity, they'll almost certainly be drier, they'll have the same crumb and outside "baked-ness" as each other, always, the same density, the same (or similar) amount of powdered sugar, which doesn't fall off the donut, they can sit in shipping containers for a long time without getting gross, and so on. All of these ingredients also change the taste and texture, since you can do things with baked goods that go stale in a day and those that go stale in a month. I think major bakery brands probably still have regional bakeries, but nothing like there used to be before the food science got this good ("good").
Lastly, donuts are generally fried, and fried items do not travel well over distance nor time.
posted by rhizome at 3:36 PM on October 20, 2019 [3 favorites]
I have some Donettes here, let's see how they compare to a traditional cake donut recipe (flour, sugar, eggs, milk, baking powder, butter, etc.).
tl;dr: It's practically a different recipe, or at least the difference between a station wagon and a 4WD truck.
==
I'm not a food scientist, but this is my interpretation of the purpose of some of the "technical" ingredients in factory-made store-bought donuts, based on some cursory research. Take with a 0.1g Potassium Chloride. Actual bakers may know more.
- Enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, ferrous sulfate or reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, ribolavin, folic acid)
- palm oil
- butter replacement that doesn't go rancid, stabilizer
- water
- dextrose
- powdered sugar replacement
- sugar
- cornstarch
- density control, stabilizer
- soybean oil
- fat substitute, stabilizer
- glycerin
- emulsifier, stabilizer, prevents starches from decomposing
- nonfat milk
- defatted soy flour
- gluten control
- egg yolk
- sodium acid pyrophosphate
- baking powder control
- baking soda
- sodium aluminum phosphate
- baking powder control
- salt
- nat/artif flavor
- mono and diglycerides
- crumb softener
- dextrin
- fiber, texture control
- soy lecithin
- stabilizer, fat replacement
- citric acid
- preservative (calcium proprionate, sorbic acid, potassium sorbate, sodium propionate, natamycin)
- enzyme
- karaya gum
- moisture control
- guar gum
- thickener, stabilizer
- cellulose gum
- texture control, stabilizer
- color (titanium dioxide, annatto, turmeric)
All of this engineering results in a recognizable donut with some special properties: they'll resist the effects of moisture/humidity, they'll almost certainly be drier, they'll have the same crumb and outside "baked-ness" as each other, always, the same density, the same (or similar) amount of powdered sugar, which doesn't fall off the donut, they can sit in shipping containers for a long time without getting gross, and so on. All of these ingredients also change the taste and texture, since you can do things with baked goods that go stale in a day and those that go stale in a month. I think major bakery brands probably still have regional bakeries, but nothing like there used to be before the food science got this good ("good").
Lastly, donuts are generally fried, and fried items do not travel well over distance nor time.
posted by rhizome at 3:36 PM on October 20, 2019 [3 favorites]
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posted by btfreek at 10:29 AM on October 19, 2019 [5 favorites]